This about enjoying life to the full with my lovely partner- I scream my head off here so I can pretend to be coping when I have to. MS has robbed my darling of the use of much of her body but has increased our determination to share our love to the full and get as much fun out this world as we can glean. Sometimes it all gets to much so I need to scream about it.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Terror and people.

This is a very interesting link.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175013Ms Roy’s excellent piece on the situation within and around the borders of India certainly helped fill in some missing information and opened discussions that I felt were left out of most comment on Mumbai. Thank you Ms. Roy.She demonstrated well that “terrorism” can mean many things. Terrorism is a methodology and not ideological. It is Machiavelli in action. The problem for the Indian state is not terrorism- it is its inability to keep its monopoly of terrorism. Diseases that are easily treated terrorize whole communities. Some national minorities in India live in state of siege from the Indian government. Indian workers live in daily terror of unemployment, homelessness and starvation: that is what disciplines them to years of monotony and exhaustion as their hands and brains create the Indian economic miracle.

Looking at the history of the anarchist move into ‘propaganda of the deed’ in the nineteenthCentury you see a clear mistake in thinking. Joachim Most’s belief that the new science of explosives had democratized the ability to do harm and that it was now possible for the working class to challenge the bosses monopoly of terror did not prove the trump card. The ruling class did not react to their new vulnerability in the way reasonable people may have expected. Rather than understand the need for change and an end to oppression they armed for war and increased the terror. The working class being sickened with the cruelty and violence in their daily lives did not rally to the concept of inflicting sickening acts of violence in the name of freedom, even if the victims were the most degenerate part of a parasite class. The holders of the means to murder on an industrial scale could then label those amateur bombers and sharpshooters as ‘terrorists’ and the cause of the instability that occasionally rocks capitalist society and as a good reason to suppress any form of organization amongst the poor.The desperation of risen workers who saw the aftermath of the Paris Commune and other post insurrectionary bloodbaths led to the mistaken idea that we could change the world by mirroring the methodology of our oppressors. The Marxist Leninist party and the Anarchist terror cell were forms of organization we took from our enemy and have only served to recreate the dictatorial elitism of our oppressors within our own ranks. The false methodologies of compulsion and authority are the means of creating dictatorship not freedom.The only challenge to terrorism is a challenge to all authority. Capitalism is not a system that even pretends to meet the needs of people. Whole sections of the world population can go hang when not required- whole countries starving – terror in every hungry face. Ms Roy is so right in pointing this out. The atrocious acts in Mumbai are shocking because the amateur terrorists have not the skill and subtlety of the professionals. Capitalism is the ultimate terror cell and is willing to contemplate a planetary suicide mission rather than consider compromise.